TL;DR: Norway subsidised electric cars a lot, that money went to the rich more than the poor, and left them with less money to spend on transit which delivers better outcomes for cities.
Clickbait headline, and stupid article. At no point are they making the claim that EVs are worse than combustion engines. The author posits that bicycles and walking are even more climate friendly than driving a car of any kind (duh). This entire article could be replaced by the sentence, “We should keep building trams and bike lanes in the EV era”.
I think this is a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Norway is, on a whole, much more rural; a large portion of the population lives in small towns and villages in areas with difficult terrain (think fjords), where public transport beyond a bus is impractical due to population densities.
The public transport in Oslo and Bergen are fantastic - Norway’s only two large cities. Keeping in mind that over a quarter of the population of the entire country lives in these two, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
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